(1) Determining Life Opportunities:

Opportunities and rewards of a person are greatly affected by his class position. Wealth and income confers power and members of the upper class have more power than lower class people. This helps them attaining leading positions in the political, educational and cultural spheres. Major types of mental disorder and physical illness, including heart disease, cancer, diabetes, pneumonia and bronchitis, are all move common at lower levels of the class structure than towards the top (Waitzkin, 1986).

(2) Colouring Personality Development:

Social classes act like sub-cultures, the personality development of the child is affected in many ways by social classes. His goals, interests and habits are affected by the needs of social world he lives in. His moral standards are equally class-typed. Studies of child development and socialisation show that there is a lot of difference in the personality make-up of lower-class and middle-class groups.

(3) Assigning Social Responsibilities and Privileges:

Social classes provide their members with distinctive sub-cultures that prepare them for specialised functions in society. It is said that the social class is useful as an efficient means of role allocation in the society. Through role allocation, a society fixes social responsi­bilities of persons.

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Champions of functional theory of stratification (Davis and Moore, 1945) claim that society requires a variety of occupational roles, and one’s social class background equip a person with the skills and attitudes desirable for his occupational function. A lot of unpleasant work must be done in any society, and someone must be persuaded to do it.

The class system compels someone to do such unpleasant jobs. This position has been sharply criticised, and it is said that social class may be dysfunctional. It hinders social adjustment and it may make it difficult for the individual to make the best use of his potential abilities.

(4) Shaping Life-Adjustment Patterns:

Social class affects the way people deal with virtually every aspect of reality. The way people handle life situations varies with social class. The lower class tends to be radical in political action connected with economic benefits. But this class is conservative in accepting social changes while the opposite tends to be true of the upper class.

(5) Explaining Many Group Differences:

Social class affects the style of life of its members. As said above, social classes act like sub­cultures and, therefore, the groups which live differently, also think and behave differently. This is why, we see great diversity in the outlook and behaviour of different social classes. A band of sociologists are of this view that many other kinds of group differences—racial, religious, regional—are really class differ­ences.

(6) Defining the Conventional Morality:

Social classes do not merely differ in etiquette or mode of behaviour; they also differ in more judgments. In his study of sex behaviour, Kinsey (1948) has shown how sex mores differ between classes. Premarital sex experience, which is viewed as ‘natural’ by the lower classes, is generally condemned by the middle classes. For them it is degenerating and ‘unnatural’. On almost every point of moral conduct, class-typed mores differ.

(7) Cultivating Class Ethnocentrism:

Social class directly or indirectly helps in developing stereotypes and prejudices against other than one’s own class. People at every class level tend to see those above themselves as snobbish, pretentious, exploiters and those beneath as either disgusting or pathetic, delinquents etc.

Members of one class judge members of other classes in terms of their own expectations and values. The feeling of ‘us’ and ‘them’ begins with the family which later on paves the way for the formation of class ethnocentrism.